Time and venue: 23 October, Linna 6017 at 10-12, followed by a joint lunch.
Surveillance Life – Predisposed in Welfare State Denmark
Professor Ayo Wahlberg, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Increasing numbers of people are coming to learn that they have an inherited elevated risk of serious disease due to a particular genetic variant or ‘mutation’ that is considered ‘clinically actionable’. In welfare state Denmark, persons identified as genetically predisposed in this way are often advised to take part in lifelong surveillance programmes. In this talk I will show how Lynch syndrome (genetic predisposition to colorectal cancer) has come to be embedded within a preventive health complex whereby the state actively watches over its “at risk” citizens. Such a preventive imperative raises questions about what surveillance is and whether there is such a thing as (a welfare) society without it?
Bio
Ayo Wahlberg is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Good Quality – the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (2018) and co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology (2022) as well as Mundane Genomics: DNA after the Hype (2026). Ayo is a Senior Editor of the inter-disciplinary journal BioSocieties.
The guest lecture is open to all faculty, welcome!
For more info: mianna.meskus@tuni.fi